


thick skin, electric heart

by fruitbattery



Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Canon-Typical Bastardism, Canon-Typical Behavior, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, found family plus violence, light eye gore, non graphic ptsd
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-17
Updated: 2020-02-17
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:00:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22767391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fruitbattery/pseuds/fruitbattery
Summary: What happens when *someone* finds out that Doc Carmilla knew shit-all about cybersecurity?
Relationships: Gunpowder Tim & Drumbot Brian
Comments: 10
Kudos: 161
Collections: Stowaways' Shenanigans





	thick skin, electric heart

**Author's Note:**

> I have no excuse for this except the mechs server made me do it. warning for extreme silliness. title loosely inspired by sia's elastic heart

Tim knew, really, that this might be going too far, but he was far too pleased with himself to care. The halls of the Aurora were dim, lit only by the recessed strands of ridiculous color-changing lights Nastya had insisted on installing (said they were a Valentine’s Day gift). Tim leaned against the wall across from Jonny’s cabin, looking nervously up and down the corridor while the Drumbot fiddled with something on the door. After longer than he might like, Tim heard the click of something retracting into Brian’s arm, and a quietly robotic “Finished. Go.” Without a second thought, Tim took off down the corridor towards his own cabin, only pausing very briefly to glance back at the door in question, and its nice, new, gleaming plaque reading “Jonny D’Ville: First Mate of the Aurora”...........

Tim awoke to a peculiar sensation. He was sure he’d put his eyes in their solution before bed– it was some combination of saline and motor oil the Doc had formulated and Raph kept him supplied with– so he should have been seeing a faint light as the morning sun filtered through the plastic container. Instead, though, what he was seeing was pitch darkness. His first thought was that Jonny had stolen his eyes again in retribution for the previous night’s prank, but upon further inspection, there was a strange tickling sensation in his mouth–

Tim gagged as he realized his eyes were attempting to force their way down his throat. Blindly, he thrashed around for a minute in a panic before realizing the eyes were essentially powerless compared to a….. well, even a human, and much less a Tim. He could just reach into his mouth and retrieve them. 

Which he did, retracting the legs by feel with the push of a button, then popping them back into his skull and blinking a few times to let them calibrate. When Tim’s vision cleared, his first sight was Jonny standing by his bedside, staring at him intently with a piece of metal clutched in his hand. And, of all people, Ivy was standing behind him, clearly thinking very hard, and with her eyes closed. Before Tim had a chance to react, the First Mate plaque, now honed to a razor-sharp edge, slashed across his throat, and with a spurt of blood, Tim blacked out.

Murder, as Tim mused several hours later at breakfast, was an entirely normal pastime on the Aurora, and likely entirely deserved given the shit he’d pulled last night. But the eyes thing? That was something new and, frankly, disturbing. Jonny wasn’t very likely to help him out, Tim surmised, so Ivy would be his next best bet to find out what was happening.

Tim found Ivy exactly where he’d expected her to be: curled up like a particularly flexible cat on the hard floor of the Aurora’s small library. She didn’t look up as he entered, but raised a hand in acknowledgement. Tim sat cross-legged in front of her.

“Ivy.”

She didn’t look up from her book. “Yes, Tim?”

“My–”

“Your eyes, yes. That seemed like the likeliest reason for you to seek me out.”

“Yeah. Well, firstly, what the fuck. Secondly, how the fuck, and thirdly, why? Just why?”

Ivy shrugged, still not looking at him. “Jonny asked me to, and by my calculations it had a greater than ninety one percent possibility of being _fucking hilarious._ ”

Tim stared at Ivy, still completely deadpan and absorbed in her book. “.......right. On second thought, I don’t particularly care how you did it. All I want to know is, can you do it to the others, and will you do it for me?”

Ivy nodded, but made no further comment.

The silence stretched out for longer than it should have, like a piece of saltwater taffy made of regret. After a minute or so, Tim got to his feet and left Ivy to her book. She didn’t seem to notice.

***

Jonny was fluent in Morse code from his mortal days– it paid to have a nonverbal communication method when you were leading a life of crime. Tim’d learned it too– the War had made it very useful indeed. So when Jonny’s heart started to tap out an odd rhythm that he quickly identified as “first mate” in Morse code, and he looked across the room to see Tim barely containing a shit-eating grin and Ivy with her eyes closed, tapping absently on her leg, his eyes narrowed.

It was on.

Tim wasn’t happy about his eyes’ legs attempting to sprout while they were inside his head, but at least that was better than Jonny “accidentally” dropping one out of an airlock, or making it run up onto a ceiling fan to make Tim suddenly incredibly nauseated. Once he even left it behind on some backwater planet. Tim was lucky he had Brian on his side, as it took months to find the thing on the planet’s surface, let alone to get to the planet itself.

It was around the time Tim got his eye back from that debacle, that the others’ Mechanisms started acting up. First it was Marius– Tim woke up, jolted out of a dead sleep, to hear the strains of a fiddle from across the ship in the direction of Marius’s cabin.

Tim went to investigate, of course– even immortal space pirates need sleep– but by the time he got there, the music had stopped. He found Marius sitting on his bed, staring confusedly at his arm, which was holding his violin under his chin in picture-perfect form. He looked up at Tim, confusion written all over his face. 

“Where did I get this violin? It’s not even my violin.”

From then on it got more and more frequent– Nastya came to breakfast looking horribly misshapen a few days later. Evidently, all of her blood had decided to flow into her left side. Being left-handed, this created quite the challenge– the sight of Nastya, normally rail-thin, attempting to eat food with a bulbous left hand and a completely shriveled right was too much for her crewmates to bear without laughter, no matter the intensity of her death glares or Aurora’s huffy screeching over the intercom. The next day, Ivy complained of a ringing headache all day, layered on top of, of all things, the Happy Birthday song on repeat. Tim also occasionally heard the clank-clank-clank of Drumbot Brian walking down the corridor towards him over the bot’s own indignant protests. 

One of the most catastrophic events Tim witnessed during that period occurred about two weeks in. Tim, Brian, and Ashes were on the lower deck, playing cards. Ashes was winning as always, but Tim saw the concentration on Brian’s face. As Ashes considered their hand, an expression of terror crossed their face. Their breathing turned labored, and Tim could see them clutching at their chest. The expression on their face was like nothing Tim had ever seen– powerless, terrified, they looked suddenly like a mortal young adult terrified for their life. 

Tim started to ask, “Ashes? Are you–”

Ashes screamed, a choking, horrible thing, trying to form words but failing. Dimly, beside him, Tim noticed the Drumbot knocking over his own chair in an attempt to flee the room. Ashes, still clutching at their chest with one hand, pushed themself off of their chair and staggered after the Drumbot, choking out obscenities and reaching into their jacket for something Tim couldn’t see, but assumed, knowing Ashes, that it was very, very flammable.

When Tim next came to, all he could smell was smoke, and all he could see was Nastya standing above him, fiddling with the eye not in Tim’s face. “Your eyes should soon be free of any outside influence. I have installed a firewall in everyone, I just need to find Raphaella for final programming.” 

Tim sat up, rubbing his head. Nastya looked _pissed_ , and the Aurora had clearly had a hull breach somewhere nearby– he was finding it hard to breathe. “Ashes… Aurora….”

Nastya scowled. “Brian decided to fuck with Ashes’s lungs. They did not like that, and proceeded to….. get violent. Aurora took most of the blast. I have already repaired her mostly– and she is finishing up as we speak.” She gave one last poke to Tim’s eye. “There. Pop that in, you should be fine.”

As Tim sat against the wall and waited to be able to breathe easier, he heard a burst of rapid-fire swearing from around a corner. Raphaella stumbled into his line of vision, attempting to pry her wings off her face where they had decided to wrap themselves, rendering her completely blind. Nastya caught her before she ran into anything important, and after a second or two of fighting Raph allowed herself to be handled. Tim watched as Nastya sat her down and crossed behind her, opening up the control panel for her wings.

Nastya caught Tim’s eye over Raph’s shoulder and scowled. “It is not nice to stare when a lady is being worked over.”

Raph laughed, muffled from under her wings. “It’s fine, Nastya. Is that Tim?” Tim mumbled in the affirmative, still a little tired from loss of oxygen. “He can watch, I don’t mind.” Raph’s wings were still covering her whole face, but Tim could hear the smirk in her voice. He dropped his head into his hands.

***

The crew of the Aurora sat, in various states of sulk-itude, in a vague circle on the floor of the bridge. Nastya stood in the center, looking irritated. “Right. So. We all have seen and experienced the….. strange happenings in the last few weeks, yes?” A few murmurs of irritation. “Toy Soldier, I know you follow orders like nobody’s business, but it isn’t very useful to our cause to have you suddenly attempt to strangle Marius. We can all agree on that, yes?”

The whole crew nodded, some of them a bit petulantly. The Toy Soldier looked no less pleased than it had a moment before, which was to say, delighted to all be together. Ivy spoke up. 

“Yes, Nastya, that does sound….. sub-optimal.”

Nastya smiled, too toothily. “Great! So. While this last week has been simply oodles of fun, I have decided it would not be, as Ivy says, optimal, for just anyone to have access to the _very mechanisms that make our bodies work_.”

Ivy and Brian had the decency to at least look a little chastised.

“So, in the interests of safety,” Nastya continued, “I have installed a firewall in each of your mechanisms to ensure this does not happen again. Any questions?”

No one raised their hands except Jonny. “Can we go now, please?”

Nastya leveled her best glare at him. “Yes, but I expect you to act better next time.”

Jonny got to his feet and shot her in the heart.

Later, when the Aurora decided to scream through the intercom speakers in his cabin for three weeks straight, Jonny _almost_ considered not playing dirty again.

Almost.


End file.
